The Whitney does not allow photography but this nice guard said I could take his picture. This is the best museum picture I could do.I don't really get modern art, and believe me, I've tried. I even rented the life story of Jackson Pollack because although I don't particularly care for his art, it is important to me to know why it is art and why it is considered so great. My brother-in-law stood in awe when I took him to the MOMA and he saw an original Pollack for the first time. I go to these exhibits all the time, in hopes of finally learning something, but I am still unsuccessful. The closest I have ever come to an understanding was a trip to an exhibit about the abstract art critics with a friend who is an abstract artist. She managed to explain some of the stuff to me, and I got it, at the time. Now, it is gone again.
I really liked the cubism stuff (Charles Biederman and Kenneth Price were the two on display.) That, I get. The pieces fit together and I can even see where the title comes from. I also found tons of math relevant art. It would be great to take my geometry class on a trip here. Maybe some of the stuff I am trying to teach them would actually make sense to them if they saw that there is math in art. One guy (Sol Lewitt) had a whole thing on constructing a circle using the theorem "A chord is the perpendicular bisector of another chord, it passes through the center of the circle." I listened to two guys debating the merits of constructing a circle in this manner and was thrilled to hear others share my love of mathematics. David Smith had two pieces dedicated to the circle. There were a pair of chairs with obtuse angles, there was art work made up of parallel lines (Flying Fortress by Ronald Blade), Isometric Systems by Agnes Denes,and my favorite, Symbolism of Geometry by Peter Halley (rectilinear angles), and they all represented something real to me. I guess the math teacher in me needs to understand and needs everyone to see the same thing.
I can't for the life of me figure out why three photographs on a wooden post is art, or why a video of a naked woman covered with wall paper glue rolling around in toilet paper is art either (Carolee Schneeman--Body Art) There was a painting by Jo Baer which was a white, black and blue frame and my least favorite was a painting by Mary Heilman of blue and white, which to me looked like the blue ran on the white, something I would have done myself and trashed. I know I must be missing something. I could go on, but I think I made my point. These works of art are in the Whitney. It must be me, not them.
Aside from my continuing pursuit to understand, what I don't understand, I had an ulterior motive for going to the Whitney this weekend. I saw an advertisement for the Jenny Holzer exhibit (since I couldn't take photos, you will have to visit the site or the museum itself) Protect Protect on the subway and I knew it was something I had to see. Ms. Holzer uses language as her medium had has created critically important body of work over the past three decades. Her texts have appeared in media such as posters, electronic sings, billboards, T-shirts and dematerialized luminous surfaces such as crashing ocean waves and the Louvre's large glass pyramid. The works in this exhibit feature selections of Holzer's writings from 1977 to 2001 as well as declassified pages from U.S. government documents she has used as source material since 2004. The exhibit deals with plans for the Iraqi war and the problems of the power of personal desire. My original attraction was her use of LED signs which drew from her texts and declassified government documents. In other words, it is political as well as artistic, two things that hooked me from the start.
Since I couldn't photograph any of the art I liked (or didn't like), I decided to just photograph the graffiti I found along my walk downtown.
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